Travel Hacks - Ballin’ On A Budget
So you’re planning a big trip, maybe it’s a year around the world, maybe it’s a long weekend in one of your dream destinations. No matter what your trip looks like, you’re going to want to take in everything your destination has to offer. Despite this, your travel budget may sometimes be more limited than you expect or would like it to be. We’re traveling on a low(ish) budget across these 13 months, so we’ve had to learn how to take it all in with our monetary limitations in mind. In this post, we’ll share some of the things we’ve learned, and how we’ve been able to fully enjoy each place we’ve been while conserving our money, or AKA ‘Ballin’ on a Budget’.
Groceries & Meals Out
It may seem like common sense, but trying to keep your food costs to a minimum can go a long way toward staying under budget on your trip. While we expected this based on previous trips, our recent adventures have still left us surprised when looking back and breaking down our spending in each country. Food has perpetually been one of our highest, if not the highest, expense category across the first five months of our worldwide adventure. Having first really noticed this during our travels across Australia, we’ve begun to adjust how we approach our schedule of eating out vs getting groceries.
Don’t get us wrong - nothing beats a dinner out in a new city, as it's one of the best ways to experience local culture, people, and customs. That said, this experience comes at a cost and may contribute to that sinking feeling at the end of the month. With dinner typically being our most expensive meal of the day, we’ve started to purchase groceries and cook in our accommodation, where possible. This has proven to be fairly easy, as we’re taking advantage of being out and about in the morning and during the day, but find ourselves closer to our accommodation in the evenings. Also, coffee and breakfast is often the smallest and most affordable meal of the day, especially if breakfast consists of bakery items as it often does for us (this is Sarah’s doing, but I’m not complaining). Additionally, we know that trying new coffee shops and bakeries is something that we really value on our trips, so we don’t want to give up these experiences. Balancing this cost savings on dinners where possible alongside relying on smaller meals, like breakfast, to give us the local experience, has allowed us to bring down our total daily food cost without losing out on local cuisine. Food, like most things on a long-trip, is all about balance, making sure you're still getting the experiences most important to you, while saving money on the things you can.
Re-Check Booked Accomodations & Experiences
We have tried to keep our plans as flexible as possible, avoiding booking most of our hotels or flights until close to our travel date. However, for some popular destinations or unfamiliar places like Japan or Oman, you’ll want to make your reservations ahead of time. In these places you can frequently save money by re-examining hotel options two or three times closer to your arrival date, so long as you have a flexible and fully-refundable cancellation. We’ve often found that prices dropped for many properties the closer we got to our scheduled arrival, and have re-booked for a destination in this case. This strategy has allowed us to save hundreds of dollars across our first four months of travel, translating to a lower cost per day and allowing us to take advantage of more activities at these destinations.
The above strategy can also be applied to experiences you’ve booked. We’ve booked several activities through Viator or GetYourGuide far ahead of time to ensure we were able to have an experience that was important to us, without the stress of worrying it will be sold out by the time we actually get there. However, that means we don’t get access to last minute discounts when companies are trying to fill any empty seats on one of their tours. Luckily, many of the tour and activity operators on both of these sites offer free cancellation until close to the activity’s scheduled time. It’s always worth continuing to re-check what you’ve booked to see if any last minute deals show up and switch your activity if possible. This has also saved us a few hundred dollars on our trip so far, and trust me, every dollar counts!
Make Smart Choices on Car Rentals
When in remote places like the Australian outback, New Zealand’s South Island, or the Nullarbor it’s almost a requirement to rent a car in order to reach the spots you want to visit. That said, it’s important to remember that not all cars are created equal, and the decisions you have when making that initial rental reservation can save you hundreds down the line. For instance, in New Zealand we wanted to have a vehicle that could double as our emergency shelter if we got bad weather while camping, but this meant we needed a big family-sized SUV. Even though we would be paying more on a daily basis for this larger vehicle it meant that we would save a regular accommodation cost on a few nights, hopefully working out in our favor at the end of our long rental.
Additionally, even though we were renting a big SUV, we wanted it to be as affordable to drive as possible, so we made sure to pick up a hybrid SUV. A hybrid option is a great way to save money on fuel, as it can quickly add up on long drives. Alongside saving fuel by renting a hybrid, we lower our fuel costs even more by optimizing our driving as much as we can. Sometimes this means taking the slightly longer route to avoid having to drive up a big mountain, and others it means keeping the car's RPM in its sweet spot by lowering your speed when needed, even if it requires putting your ego aside and getting passed by a few gas-guzzling maniacs! These two factors have added up to shave several dollars off of our per day expenditures.
Use Those Points … All The Points
We’ve written about this before, and I’m sure we’ll write about it again, but I honestly think taking advantage of points and miles is the best way you can save money on a vacation, long or short. For this long adventure in particular, we focused on saving up a huge travel bank of points, which you can read more about in our Credit Cards & Airline Miles blog posts. So far, we’ve mainly used these points to cover our pieces of major airfare, but going forward we still have a large bank of hotel credits and points to use. We estimate these will cover at least 12 nights of accommodation, saving us at least $900 at a minimum, if maintaining our current per night accommodation cost of $75. In reality, these 12 nights of free hotel stays will likely add up to a benefit of over $3,000 as we optimize the use of our points to cover luxury hotel stays sprinkled into our trip.
We’ve also used Expedia to reserve many of our hotels, as well as some of our flights, because of the generous rewards included in their OneKey loyalty program. Each time we stay at a property we earn OneKey Cash, typically at a rate of 2% per stay or 1% per flight / car rental reservation. This is on top of any benefits we earn into the corresponding loyalty program for that hotel or airline. So far, this has added up to about $200 of OneKey cash, which we’ve used to cover two nights’ accommodation. With many nights left to go on our trip, we expect that will increase by the time we return home in early 2025. In addition to OneKey’s basic benefits, we are also now Platinum Expedia travelers because of the hotel stays and car rentals we made through their program. By adding up to just 30 elements (individual nights stayed, individual days with a rental car, or individual flights) required to reach this status, we got there fast and are now able to reap the benefits of this program. We now get 20% off thousands of hotels worldwide, food and beverage credits at select properties, and room upgrades when available.
Other Things To Consider
Timing Laundry For When It’s Provided, etc.
Laundry can be one of the most annoying chores on a long trip like this. It can suck up a lot of time while clothes wash and dry, and can be a larger cost than expected (this varies per country). In order to lower our laundry costs, as well as give ourselves back some time, we book accommodation intermittently at either apart-hotels or AirBnBs that have washing machines in the unit. This allows us to run the laundry while we’re out exploring ,or while we work on other tasks (like journaling and writing these blog posts). These places also typically come with a small amount of laundry detergent, which can be a big help when stores only sell full-size detergent packs and you have no space to keep those with you.
Reusable Items
Living in the west, we’ve had “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” drilled into our heads since we were in grade school, and that mentality can really come in handy on a trip like this. Bringing reusable water bottles has saved us from having to purchase dozens of throw-away plastic bottles. We also each have a reusable water filter, allowing us to use our reusable bottles even in destinations where many people would have to purchase throw away plastic bottles with pre-filtered water. We’d also recommend carrying a reusable bag – whether its a backpack, tote, or foldable shopping bag – as these can add up, especially in countries that use them in every store.
Sharing Items & Toiletries
Traveling with a partner allows you to frequently save money (and space) by sharing certain items or toiletries like chargers, battery packs, or toothpaste. Luckily for us, we don’t mind sharing toothpaste or a hairbrush when needed, but of course this only goes so far as there is a limit to what we’re willing to share when it comes to toiletries. Another area we’ve shared items in is electronics, since both of us have almost identical tech in our bags we can streamline the accessories we’re bringing. We share one power bank, one charging pad for our phones and airpods, and one external hard drive. Saving a bit of weight and money here or there makes a big difference in our bags and budget over time.